Meet the DAK Member - Heather

Happy Friday! Today begins a new weekly blogspot, "Meet the DAK Member". Our first featured member is none only than our Dulles Area Kiwanis charter president, Heather Talbert. She was the brain child behind starting a club in the Dulles Area and had the Kiwanis family experience and expertise to make this club a reality. Let's learn more about Heather and what makes her tick...


Name: Heather Lynn Talbert

Length in Kiwanis family: I spent 3 years in Circle K and will have 13 years in Kiwanis as of this May

Postions held: I was on the district board for one year in Circle K as Treasurer and in Kiwanis I've held the positions of Distinguished Club Secretary, Sponsored Youth / Service Leadership Program Chair, Circle K District Administrator and Charter Club President

Favorite service project: Being a volunteer on the old Children's Miracle Network Telethon at Channel 9 (W*USA) and dressing up as The Children's National Medical Center mascot Dr. Bear (yes the costume was VERY hot inside)

Where do you live? McLean, Virginia

Where is the farthest you've ever been from home? London, England

Do you have any children? A 3.5yr. old daughter, Maggie

What's currently on your Ipod? Music ranging from Leona Lewis, David Cook, Nickelback to Duran Duran, Lisa Stansfield, Billy Joel

Last Book you Read? I'm starting the Camel Club Series by David Baldacci

When I go out for a meal my go to menu choice is.... usually a hamburger of some kind. Unoriginal I know!

One thing people don't know about me...I have a 7.5in stainless steel bar fused to my vertebrae straightening out my spine.

DAK/Holiday Coalition Fall Coat Drive A Success!

By: Kate Richards, 2008 Coat Drive Coordinator and DAK Secretary

We would like to thank everyone who donated coats and/or helped during our first coat drive with the Loudoun Community Holiday Coalition. With your help, we were able to collect over 600 coats, with over 500 coats being distributed to families in need during the first two weekends in October 2008. The surplus winter coats were donated to LINK for their November 2008 coat drive and the surplus lightweight coats were donated to Goodwill. We will begin collecting coats for our second annual coat drive at the end of the summer/early fall.

You may be wondering how your organization can do a large-scale service project like a coat drive. In our case, we were approached by Kara Earl, who works with the Loudoun County Holiday Coalition, about taking over the coat drive that was previously partnered with the Holiday Coalitions’ Holiday Store. We took the idea back to the club to seek their approval since this would be a major undertaking for our small (but growing) club. Everyone in our club agreed that this would be a great project for us, so then the real work began. In order to do a large-scale service project (especially one that relies on the community to support) you need a well thought out game plan.

Our game plan included:

• A timeline for the entire project, start to finish
• Developing a list of places to contact about being coat drop off locations (Kara graciously provided us information on who the Holiday Coalition has partnered with)
• Developing deadlines to contact the places as well as put the drop off boxes out as well as making certain club members the point of contact
• Providing advertising and PR (again Kara helped us with sharing contact information)
• Developing a schedule for when the coats would be picked up, who was responsible for each drop off location, and when they would be dropped off at our coat drive location
• Our club came together for one afternoon for sorting the donated coats into the various sizes, age ranges and sexes (S,M,L; children, youth, adults, Men and Women’s)
• We developed a system to track the number of coats collected and distributed
• We held the coat distribution over two weekends in the beginning of October

We made sure to have both English and Spanish versions of our fliers and advertisements. We learned that we need more people on the collecting/sorting end of the project and that a smaller group from our club can handle the distribution end. For our first year we are very happy that we collected over 600 coats (in years past the Holiday Coalition and their other partners have been able to collect many more coats). We expect to collect more coats in the future because last year was the first year the coat drive and the Holiday Store distribution were separate events. The event is an earlier event than in years past and will continue to be on the early October timeline. We are looking to have this project grow along with our club and we are really looking forward to the future partnerships we develop with this service project (and other community based efforts).

A big thank you goes out to all of our coat collection partners this year: Sterling Community Center, Cascades Library, Ashburn Library, South Riding Town Hall, Dulles South Multipurpose Center, Ashburn Fuddruckers, Beyond Wellness Chiropractic, Precision Auto Care, Inc. (Leesburg), Algonkian Elementary School, Creighton's Corner Elementary School, Seldens Landing Elementary School, Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School, Farmwell Station Middle School, and Blue Ridge Middle School.

Welcome to the Dulles Area Kiwains blog!

by: Beryl Young, Dulles Area Kiwanis President

Hello and welcome to the brand new blog for the Dulles Area Kiwanis Club located in Northern, VA. It is my hope to make this a landing page for our current members, prospective members, friends, businesses, and the community at large to learn a little bit about who we are, what we do, and what we hope to accomplish as we look forward.

At the present time the Dulles Area Kiwanis is a 1.5 year old organization comprised of aprox. 20 dedicated members working to make Eastern Loudoun and Western Fairfax counties a better place to live. Our primary focus is currently on working with our service leadership programs in the area: Key Clubs at Dominion and Potomac Falls High Schools and K-Kids Clubs at Hillside and Guilford Elementary schools. Our largest annual fundraiser is a miniature golf tournament where all proceeds go towards supporting their service efforts and leadership development.

We also host other hands on and active service programs including: monthly bingo at Monroe House, a local assisted care facility, helping at the annual Belmont Concert Series, and bagging meals for the Reston Interfaith. We have big dreams about where we'd like to see our club go in the coming years, but we can't do it with out more manpower helping our efforts. We'd welcome any new ideas and new members as our club continues to build, grow, and thrive in the Dulles community. Our next club meeting will be this coming Sunday, February 1st, 3pm at the Cascades Library if you would like to learn more and meet us in person.

I hope when you visit this page, whomever you are, that you will leave comments to let us know you were here or give suggestions for how we can make your experience with our organization a positive one! Here is some food for thought for this week:

As we continue to develop our blog we already have some ideas for posting topics. A few of those include: service spotlight, interclub opportunities, and DAK member of the week. What else would you like to see posted on this site? What would keep you coming back to read regularly?